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nanda kumar jai : nanda kumar jai Open letter
nanda kumar jai : nanda kumar jai Open letter: Dear G. Have you looked at a mirror recently? No? Didn’t think so. Not that your consequence of a ménage a trios between Steven Seagal...
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Thursday 8 May 2014
Though it's not yet been shown in the UK, the finale of long-running sitcom How I Met Your Mother has aroused strong feelings among viewers – not least on even longer-running website Television Without Pity (or TWoP) where hundreds of closely-argued, articulate posts tear the episode's flaws apart.
They're living up to the site's motto: "Spare the snark, spoil the networks" – but those who make TV might be off the hook in the future as it's been announced that the site, one of the most influential on the web over the past 16 years, is to close, marking the end of an online era.
Originally Dawson's Wrap, a site making fun of po-faced 90s teen drama Dawson's Creek, later expanded and renamed Mighty Big TV then TWoP, it featured long, detailed episode recaps – a now-common form of writing about TV that TWoP helped to popularise and which, in the days before online streaming, were often the only way that fans could catch up on missed episodes. Forums for shows of all kinds, past and present, were policed (some critics said too harshly) by paid moderators, who enforced proper spelling and grammar, respectful discussion and sticking to the topic.
Although based in the US, there were always many overseas members among the thousands registered, though many lurked as readers, rather than posting their own comments. Some programme-makers also visited to gauge response to their shows and there were "shout-outs" in some,including a notorious episode of The West Wing where Aaron Sorkin took revenge for criticism of his work.
But last week, NBC Universal, which bought TWoP in 2007, announced that the site would close on Friday, 4 April, after being unable to either sell the business or sufficiently monetise its traffic. The archive of recaps and forums, covering a significant part of modern TV history, were set to be taken offline – startling many who've come to believe that everything on the internet is there forever. But, following the outcry from TV critics and fans, the company has relented and the existing recaps will remain publicly available. The forums, however, will disappear completely after 31 May.
It's a loss for TWoP's regular users, including me: since I first registered there in 2000, I've found it both a compulsive source of procrastination and a valuable professional resource. Since the announcement, the forum has been flooded with sad goodbyes, with some users saying that it provided a friendly, entertaining online haven in troubled personal times, while others wonder how the community created there – which spawned offline meet-ups, friendships and marriages – will continue. Some may migrate to Previously.tv, a site run by TWoP's original founders, but the truth is that the days of message boards are probably over.
For most people now discuss TV on social media, turning to Twitter,Tumblr and the like for instant, snappier comment, rather than summing up their thoughts afterwards, or on the blogs or comment sections of more traditional publications, like the Guardian.
As attention spans shrink to 140 characters, long, digressive recaps seem like a relic of Web 1.0, while the way we talk about TV, and pop culture in general, has changed: "Likes" and "Follows" are the currency of competition, not discussion, and our audience is more likely to be people in our existing social networks rather than strangers.
Yet TWoP and other sites helped democratise criticism, encouraging the kind of engaged, tele-literate viewer which created the market for the last decade's acclaimed dramas like Breaking Bad and Game Of Thrones. Maybe its true legacy will be that everyone's a critic now – and the makers of bad TV needn't think they'll go unsnarked.
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